Computop releases biometric solution assisting merchants in SCA & 2FA

Global payment processor Computop has launched its new PSD2 compliant biometric authentication service for online merchants and banks.

Biometrics by Computop’ enables merchants with the ability to process strong customer authentication (SCA), avoiding the need to use a banks/financial institutions own two factor authentication (2FA) during the payment process.

Availability stems from a combination of PSD2, Visa and Mastercard all permitting customer authentication to be trusted by third parties – providing merchants the opportunity to process biometrics of its new customers instead of banks applying their own two factor authentication.

“What we are providing with Computop Biometrics is a host of great advantages for retailers. Biometric authentication can be applied to app or shop logins in order to avoid fraudulent account takeovers,” explained Ralf Gladis, CEO, Computop. 

“This also helps the customer experience, because biometric authentication is so much better than a typical PIN-TAN process.” 

The solution complies with the FIDO (fast identity online) standard protocol and is suitable for PSD2 compliant SCA in online retail.

Computop believe giving merchants the power to run their own SCA processes will “avert any problems associated with 2FA” which in turn is expected to improve conversion. 

Biometrics by Computop provides merchants the capability to apply biometric authentication at an early stage in the shopping process ie when the customer(s) are first logging into the merchant’s app.

It then generates a digital signature that can be transmitted to issuers alongside with other 3D Secure 2.0 data as proof that the merchant has already applied PSD2-compliant strong customer authentication. 

Gladis continued: “For merchants there is increased complexity with the number of different authentication methods used by banks, but if they are able to process strong consumer authentication themselves, the customer journey will be standardised and easier to support. 

“In addition, the whole process is GDPR compliant, and consumers can be confident in knowing that biometric data will never leave their own device. Computop’s solution will verify cryptographic keys but will never touch cryptographic data.”

Computop Biometrics is available as a cloud service for access control; using biometric authentication for payments will be possible after the introduction of 3D Secure 2.0 on September 14.